The new FX on Hulu limited series Mrs. America begins in 1971—an era when a woman couldn’t apply for a credit card on her own, marital rape was legal, and abortion was a crime. At the same time, the women’s liberation movement had sent its first warning shots across the bow of mainstream America. Consciousness-raising groups were springing up across the country, propagating the idea that “the personal is political,” while women’s studies courses were starting to appear on college campuses. The media scrambled to cover this cultural earthquake. Feminist writers and activists like Betty Friedan, Flo Kennedy, and Gloria Steinem became familiar faces on popular talk shows and in magazines.

So did Phyllis Schlafly, a nuclear proliferation expert who rose to prominence as the queen of anti-feminism. Played formidably by Cate Blanchett, the educated and dynamic Schlafly was in some ways a model of female empowerment, the equal in accomplishment and drive to many of her adversaries in the women’s liberation movement (not to mention the male conservative politicians with whom she hobnobbed). But Schlafly found an outlet for her own ambition in weaponizing the anxiety of homemakers who resented what they saw as the condescension of college-educated liberal women. The Equal Rights Amendment looked like a shoo-in for ratification by a plurality of states—until Schlafly saw a chance to use it as a conservative wedge issue and rallying point for the right.

Mrs. America creator Dahvi Waller first stumbled across Schlafly in a women’s studies class in college, appropriately enough. Having written for two high-end period dramas (Mad Men and Halt and Catch Fire), Waller was looking for an unusual angle on 1970s feminism, and Schlafly became her counterintuitive way in. An antiheroine was born.

“I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by thinking of people who don’t agree with us as one-dimensional monsters,” she said. Waller applied that philosophy to Schlafly as well as the army of housewives (including the fictional character played here by Sarah Paulson) who helped her successfully mount opposition to the ERA. But Mrs. America doesn’t dwell just on Schlafly. An ensemble series, it gathers an array of compelling women who’ve never quite gotten their due in history books, let alone had a prestige TV series devoted to them.

There’s no danger of Mrs. America failing the Bechdel Test as it introduces us to Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba), the first African American woman elected to Congress, who ran for president in 1972; The Feminine Mystique author and National Organization for Women (NOW) cofounder Friedan (Tracey Ullman); politician Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale), whose first campaign slogan was, “This woman’s place is in the House—the House of Representatives!”; brilliant lawyer and rabble-rouser Flo Kennedy (Niecy Nash); and Ms. magazine cofounder Steinem (Rose Byrne). Whisking us from 1971 all the way to 1980, the series probes the knotty internal struggles of both the feminist and anti-feminist movements. But it also has a contemporary resonance, capturing the early days of the culture wars that rage on to this day: Schlafly’s army of homemakers, proud to fulfill their conventional, Bible–assigned roles anticipate the deplorable-and-proud-of-it red-state Americans of our present. Mrs. America might just turn out to be an intro to contemporary women’s history class for the streaming generation.

Vanity Fair: The historical moment at the beginning of this series is both the start of the mainstreaming of women’s liberation, and the beginning of the backlash.

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Dahvi Waller: What interested me so much about Phyllis Schlafly was, we tend to tell the story of social movements in this country only from the point of view of the heroes of social movement and progress—without really delving deeply into the ensuing backlash. And there is always a backlash. Every time we take a step forward, there is a step back, as we saw in 2016. So I really wanted to start right at the moment that the backlash would begin—that really was around 1971 and ’72—when the feminist movement starts going mainstream and becoming a real threat.

Phyllis Schlafly was a kind of villainous figure in my feminist-leaning household growing up, but the series aims to put her in a broader personal and political context. What were the keys to Schlafly for you and Cate Blanchett?

I think what excited us was her backstory. She was not a homemaker who rose up and got other homemakers to the fight the Equal Rights Amendment. This is a woman who is Harvard educated, went to undergrad at Wash U, studied military strategy and nuclear weapons. Strategic defense was her real passion. I always love to think of a central question for the main character of any series I’m working on, and for this, it’s like: what made this woman, who had a career for 20 years in strategic defense, pivot to take on this women’s issue? That contradiction in her makes her a very complex and interesting character to write and to portray.

Cate Blanchett as Phyllis Schlafly

Pari Dukovic/ FX.

There’s a scene in the series where she goes to Washington and gives advice to Nixon’s advisers, and then she goes home and we see her lay limply on the bed while her husband has sex with her, because it’s her wifely duty. You were trying to dramatize the different planes even the most brilliant women were having to toggle between.

That’s what really is fascinating about Phyllis: If you are an ambitious, brilliant woman, but you accept the patriarchal order of things, how do you get by, how do you make your way, how are you successful? When you’ve accepted that you live in a patriarchal system and you’re okay with that, what does ambition look like in that context? It looks very different [for Phyllis] than it would for Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem or Bella Abzug or Shirley Chisolm.

Although as you show, that looks different for each of them too.

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Yes, exactly! Everyone has a different path. And that’s why it was really important to me to make this an ensemble piece, and to Cate as well. Because there wasn’t one version of a feminist leader. They were all so different, and it really gets messy—and that’s okay. I want to see women being messy on television.

The word intersectionality hadn’t been coined at that point, though Frances M. Beal had already written about the idea of double jeopardy—but how did you try to draw that thread through the series?

One of the challenges of doing a show centered on the battle of the Equal Rights Amendment is that not all the feminist leaders were directly involved in that particular battle. So we wanted to be really creative about ways to bring in the story of the birth of intersectional feminism. I think you can really look at that Democratic convention in 1972, where Shirley Chisholm was running for president, as the very beginning. Flo Kennedy was a huge part of that, as we see in episode four. And the other story that really hasn’t been told a lot about the women’s movement is the takeover of the Republican Party, and the loss of Republican feminist leaders. We wanted to tell that story through Jill Ruckelshaus [a founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus who served as head of the Office of Women’s Programs in Nixon's White House], played by Elizabeth Banks.

Gloria Steinem didn’t emerge out of NOW or out of grassroots radical feminism. She sort of dropped into the women’s movement as a successful journalist who was glamorous and already famous. Some of the early radical feminists were resentful of her sudden prominence as a figurehead. Did your vision of Gloria change as you were working on the series?

I grew up thinking of Gloria Steinem as this feminist icon. You know, I remember seeing Ms. magazine around our house, and she was the most famous feminist I knew of. As I started researching this time period, it felt to me that [in the early ’70s] she was still very much a work in progress. She hadn’t quite emerged as the iconic Gloria Steinem we think of today…. She was very much pushed out in front to combat the negative stereotype of feminists. I have a scene in the beauty parlor with Phyllis and her friends saying, “I don’t understand how she can’t find a husband. She’s so pretty!” Because there was this negative stereotype that feminists were bitter and single and childless, and no one wanted to marry them. And Gloria—every man wanted to marry her. Of course, she really wanted to be taken seriously; she didn’t want to be just the pretty face of the movement.

The series also plunges into the messy relationship between Steinem and Friedan.

We tend to paint our heroes as larger than life. And I was interested in the ways they were just like us and, and really human and conflicted and messy. And this dynamic between Betty and Gloria in many ways feels relatable. I mean, who hasn’t felt envious of the new girl on the block, or the new person in the office who’s getting all the attention and beloved by everyone, or who we think is prettier or more successful or more popular than we are?

You didn’t consult with Steinem?

Because I wanted to tell the story from different perspectives and not have a singular POV into this time period, I purposely didn’t want to have one figure from that time be a consultant on the show. I wanted to have the freedom to really explore different perspectives.

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You wrote for Mad Men, and I remember an episode you cowrote [“The Beautiful Girls”] in which Peggy comes in contact with the women’s liberation movement of this period. Did your work on Mad Men influence how you approached this historical material for Mrs. America?

I learned so much from being in that writer’s room. The way Matt [Weiner] approached story, the way he approached character. Obviously that was fiction and this is based on true events, but the ways in which he worked with the tapestry of historical events and wove them into a real character piece I’m sure has trickled into all my work. I think he found ways to subvert our expectations about a time period—you know, prior to Mad Men, people thought of the 1960s as only what happened in the late ’60s, and being very tumultuous. Similarly, I’d always thought of the ’70s as bell bottoms and disco and social upheaval. Phyllis Schlafly and her followers was not something I thought about. So I love subverting and changing how we think about a time period.

1970s feminism and the ERA isn’t a topic that’s gotten a lot of mainstream pop culture attention. When did you first propose it, and what was the elevator pitch to FX?

We pitched it back in 2015 as a different way into the ’70s and the women’s movement, from the point of view of the villain—the spoiler of the Equal Rights Amendment. And they immediately got it. I was writing a draft of the pilot during the 2016 election, and afterwards, I remember thinking, Oh, this whole show needs to change. It’s not just about the Equal Rights Amendment—it’s much larger than that. In many ways, you can see the series as an origin story for the culture wars of today. You could see how all the fault lines develop. This was the rise of the religious right. That wasn’t in the elevator pitch—that all came out of living through the 2016 elections. Originally it was: won’t it be ironic to tell the story of one of the most famous anti-feminists when we have a woman president?[Laughs bitterly]

Ten years ago, this show probably wouldn’t have been greenlit, because networks would’ve assumed no one was interested in this topic. Does the playing field feel any more level for women creators?

I definitely think there are more opportunities. Like you said, this wouldn't have been greenlit years ago, and now it is. And to get to write a show set in politics which aces the Bechdel Test really gives me hope. That said, one of the greatest lessons I got from working on the series is we’re never as far ahead as we think we are. The oppression just gets a little more insidious and less overt.

Right now, it’s both insidious and overt. Roe v. Wade—which was decided during the era of Mrs. America—is in danger of being overturned.

When were working on episode two and three where Gloria’s pushing for abortion rights, one of the notes we got [from executives] was: how are viewers going to really relate to the stakes of it? Within a few months, literally, I was like: I think it’s going to be very relatable, unfortunately.

Uzo Aduba in Mrs. America.

Sabrina Lantos/FX.

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It shocks me how much Shirley Chisholm and many of the other historical figures in the series have been largely forgotten. Any thoughts on why that is?

My guess is that women weren’t writing history, and now that women are writing history and directing the movies and writing the television shows, we are going to see these untold stories come to light. I didn’t even know about Shirley Chisholm until 2008, when Barack Obama ran for president. And when we started this series and I discovered that she founded the National Women’s Political Caucus along with Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and Betty Friedan, I was equally puzzled. That’s why even though her story is not directly related to the battle of the Equal Rights Amendment, it was crucial that we included her in the story of the series, and we gave her her episode to really tell the story that hasn’t been told—and needs to be told.

Why make this as a limited series when there are so many more stories to tell?

I don’t know that we would have been lucky enough to get the cast that we were lucky to get if it weren’t a limited series. That’s the great thing about limited: you can get actors who can’t commit to five years. But...you just never know. Fargo was supposed to be a limited series, and now it’s on season four. There’s definitely more story to be told.

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